Chinese tongue-twisters

In my last post I introduced THIRTY common words all pronounced “shi”. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that with so many homophones, Mandarin has some fantastic tongue-twisters. And by “fantastic” I mean “utterly impossible to recite”. But isn’t that the fun of all tongue-twisters??

One of the early tone mistakes learners of Mandarin are taught is that the words for “Mum” and “horse” only differ by tone (it later turns out that’s also true for “numb” and “to curse”). A little tongue-twister playing on this goes:
妈妈骑马，马慢妈妈骂马 – māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn māma mà mǎ
Mum rides a horse, [when] the horse is slow Mum curses the horse.

This youtube video has an extended version of the “4 is 4” tongue-twister, along with two others, beautifully recited by one of those foreigners who speak Mandarin so well it almost makes you feel bad!

Since we’re talking about shi and si (and I already wrote about shi) I have to share with you the classic insanity of the shi poem. This is an entire story, albeit an odd one, using only words pronounced shi. That is 92 shi in a row – 97 if you include the title!!It was written in Classical Chinese, not Modern Chinese, so it uses words that aren’t common now, or that have a different usage, and the whole story would be phrased entirely differently in modern Chinese. Still, it’s a great example of the fun of homophones in Chinese!

“Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”
In a stone den was a poet with the family name Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.